ND Republican Party Mails Out 20,000 Absentee Ballot Applications Without Some Required Info
This is going to get ugly…
North Dakota`s Republican Party left off some required information when it mailed absentee ballot applications to about 20,000 people.
Secretary of State Al Jaeger says county auditors should accept the ballot applications anyway. Jaeger says the mistakes are not the fault of voters, and they shouldn`t be penalized for them.
The applications were mailed more than a week ago. North Dakota law says an application should include space for the voter`s drivers` license number and birth date. The Republican application did not ask for that information.
The state Republican director says it was an oversight. The state Democratic director says absentee ballot applications should follow the law.
Someone at the NDGOP is undoubtedly having a bad day today.
I think the fix to this isn’t to fight it. The law is the law, and trying to sneak through with some “well we’ll set it aside this time around” excuse isn’t going to cut it. Not only because it gives North Dakota Democrats (still smarting from the departure of The One’s presence in the state) something to crow about, but because it undermines the NDGOP’s ability to criticize Democrats for these kind of lapses in the future.
Again, the law is the law. We’re still a long way out from the election, so rather than playing partisan games with the Democrats just mail the ballots out again. And put a copy online to download too.
Nobody wants to see people unable to vote because of a technicality, but we can’t just ignore the law when it’s convenient.
On a related note, it’s interesting that Sec. Jaeger is willing to bend the rules for the NDGOP but stuck to his interpretation of the law (which wasn’t the correct one in my opinion) when it came to the ballot language on the measure 2 tax cut.
